Before you roll your eyes over the same old “email marketing tips” post, there’s a reason why I am writing this again: because no one ever follows good advice, it seems?
Did you know that for every $1 that Shopify stores spend on email marketing (on average and for those that use email right), they make $130 back?
That’s phenomenal. The kind of thing everyone can only dream of.
By the year 2022, the number of email users is pegged at 4.3 billion users (about half of the world’s population) and more than 333 billion emails will be sent daily by 2022. The average ROI of email marketing is at $32 for every $1 spent, according to Maryam Mohsin of Oberlo
Image Credits: Oberlo
Email marketing for businesses was, is, and will be profitable. All you have to do on your part is to understand how email marketing works, why it works as well as it does, and how you can use it to your advantage and rake in profits on a regular and predictable basis.
Before you get anywhere near fancy email marketing workflows, automated sequences, and smart segmenting with email marketing, it helps to understand the anatomy of a profitable email (not just any email) and get a primer on 10 elements you’ll need to create emails that make you money:
Note: Anatomy of a profitable email is more about layout, presentation, and how you bring all of those elements within an email (visuals, copy, and design) together to make your emails work hard. Following the basics allows you to build your reputation, stay consumer-focused, and let your potential customers (subscribers) connect with your brand on a personal level.
Use Good Subject Lines: Make an Impression
Image Credits: reallygoodemails.com
The subject line is your chance to create a solid first impression (with email marketing). It’s a window of opportunity that’s just a little short of 50-60 characters. This has the potential to make or break your chances of making your email marketing campaigns count.
Your subject line is the only way to get your subscribers’ attention, to allow them to engage with your brand, and to make an impact.
If possible, test your subject lines to see what works and what doesn’t. If you use email marketing tools like Drip, Convertkit, or MailChimp, there are split-testing features built-in.
Personalize Your Email: Stop Treating Subscribers Like Strangers
Emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened, according to Aberdeen. Personalized email messages improve click-through rates by an average of 14%, conversions by 10%, and personalized emails deliver 6x higher transaction rates.
Image Credits: reallygoodemails.com
Your emails won’t survive if you address your subscribers or potential customers with generic “Hi”, “Hello”, and “To whomsoever it may concern”.
Your subscribers will need to be addressed by name (that’s why it makes sense to actually collect at least a name and an email address when you are building your email list in the first place).
Headings, Formatting, & Typography: Look Neat. Look Pretty
Image Credits: reallygoodemails.com
Most people skim (and don’t read). Further, “It’s all about presentation”, they say. Your email messages cannot afford to look messy.
You can’t send in a huge wall of text with small, unreadable font and expect your users to swipe, slide, pinch, zoom in, and zoom out. All of these are unfriendly and you’ll lose points for no reason.
Use good typography (fonts), format headings for quick scanning (and to make them stand out).
Use Graphics:Visuals Matter
Visuals have a profound impact on us humans. More than 90% of information transmitted to the human brain is visual in nature.
Hence, using visuals is a great way to showcase products, explain your services, or to help educate your email subscribers.
Use visuals to show your products but be sure to stay relevant and only use visuals to enhance your message inside the email.
Image Credits: Venngage
Include a Call to Action: Have a Single Purpose Per Email
Let’s be honest: You are sending emails to your subscribers because you want your emails to generate sales for your business.
While you’ll do a balanced act with educating, inspiring, and teaching your subscribers, you’ll also want your subscribers to take action after they read your email.
A call to action (by using the links or buttons) is an absolutely critical inclusion within your email messages. Even if you aren’t selling anything, it’ll help if you keep training your subscribers to click on the links and buttons included within your email marketing messages.
Every email you send should have a call to action. Have your subscribers:
- Click on a link to go to another page.
- Click on a button to get access to something.
- Click on either a button or a link to learn more about your products or services.
- Click on buttons or links to go and take some action (that benefits your business — sign up for something or make a purchase).
Stay on Brand: Don’t Hide
Image Credits: virgin
The concept of email marketing is that you’d send out a series (possibly unending until a subscriber opts out or unsubscribes) to nurture leads (or subscribers) until they are ready to buy.
Depending on your business, you’ll continue to send out emails even after they make a purchase(only a little different compared to those emails that go out to everyone).
In any case, every email you send is a branding opportunity for your business. Your subscribers will recognize your logo, read your subject lines and know that it’s one of your emails. They’ll know and recognize your brand even if they don’t open or read emails.
That’s why it’s critical to stay on brand — include your logo, deploy your brand fonts consistently, and use your branded colors in every email. Keep visuals and everything else on-brand as well.
Provide Relevant Content: Give Only What They Really Want
Let’s assume that you have both subscribers (who never purchased anything) and customers (who purchased something) on the same list.
If you send out an email with a 30% discount to everyone on your list, your customers will also receive this email which might not be relevant to them (plus, they wouldn’t like the fact that they paid full price for your product earlier and that they didn’t receive this 30% discount).
First, learn to segment your email lists properly. Customers will be on a list and subscribers will be on another list. If you need more ways to organize or segment people, use tags.
For your email marketing to work, you’ll need to put in the effort to find out exactly what your subscribers want. You can do this by using trigger links (within emails), surveys, open questions, polls, forms, and more.
Doing this will help you segment, sort, and organize your audience in a way that you’d know exactly what kind of content makes sense to them and what doesn’t.
Most modern-day email marketing tools such as Convert Kit, Drip, and others have dynamic email features which allows you to tag and segment customers so that you can send them the exact emails they want to see.
Benefit from Social Sharing: Extend Your Reach
When your potential customers, subscribers, or existing customers like you, they are likely to spread the word. What’s the easiest way for them to spread the word, you ask? It’s social media.
Image Credits: reallygoodemails.com
According to Hootsuite, Facebook alone has over 2.23 billion people on the platform. There are another 1 billion+ users active, engaged, and posting every day on Instagram.
Social media is humongous and the potential reach on social is immense. You don’t want to let go of an opportunity to get a piece of that kind of reach possible with social media.
When you send out good emails as a part of your marketing strategy, chances are that your email will be shared by a few of your subscribers or customers.
Make it easy for your subscribers to spread the word about your brand on social media. Include social sharing buttons inside your email design.
Allow Them To Opt Out: Let them go, If they Choose to
Each subscriber on your email list is an actual person. They’d have different reasons to have subscribed to your list in the first place but then, things could change.
They might not be interested in your products, services, or the actual content of your email messages. Chances are that some people might want to opt-out of your list.
If so, make it easy for them to unsubscribe or opt-out (with one click).
Provide a clearly visible unsubscribe button to encourage users to opt-out when they want to. Show them that unsubscribing is optional and that they can make their choice whenever they want to.
Contrary to what you might think, most people will choose to stay on and learn from you. A few will unsubscribe and that’s ok.
Provide Contact Info: Open Your Doors
Image Credits: zapier
You don’t want to be hiding behind an obscure logo and nothing more than a domain name to identify your brand. Instead, you could let your email recipients reach out to you directly by responding to your emails directly, by calling you, or maybe even allow them to come visit you personally.
Include ways for your subscribers, potential customers, and existing customers to reach out to you in multiple ways: direct reply to emails, telephone, email, a map to show them where you are, and maybe even on social networks.
Putting yourself out there in the open lets the world know that you can be trusted and that there’s a real you behind your brand.
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